


#0201803 - Expanse

by CrunchyWrites



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Canon-typical scary ocean, Fan Statement, Gen, Statement Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-22
Updated: 2020-03-22
Packaged: 2021-02-22 23:21:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,354
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23268676
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CrunchyWrites/pseuds/CrunchyWrites
Summary: Statement of Name Withheld, regarding an experience while scuba diving in Egypt. Date of statement: 18th March, 2020.This statement is not based on a true story. This statement is a true story. And I would know, because it’s mine.
Comments: 10
Kudos: 57





	#0201803 - Expanse

I’ve always liked the water. Growing up, I lived alongside the estuary of a river, with the small, man-made beach that bordered it within easy walking distance of my home. My parents took my sisters and I there often, to play with the dogs in the soft waves, or to watch the bright flags and sails of the yearly regatta, or to go canoeing up-river to the mill, or just to swim until we tired ourselves out and walked, bare-foot and covered in sand, up the road and back home. It wasn’t the best place to go swimming, seeing how the river flowed over a mudflat which turned the water a thick, murky brown, or given how the sea, so close by, always made the water just salty enough to sting your eyes, but it was enough. It was familiar. I grew to recognise the shape of the slippery quay beneath my feet, to read the path of it from the depth-post at the end alone. The mud sliding between my toes was familiar to me, as was the occasional scurrying shift of the crabs that I inadvertently disturbed. I liked the river. I liked swimming in it. I felt at home in the water, swimming out beyond the end of the quay until there was nothing beneath my feet but open space. It didn’t scare me, being unable to touch the bottom. It never had.

I’m a very good swimmer. That’s something you need to understand. When I was young, barely into primary school, me and my sisters were all enrolled in swimming lessons. The instructor liked to challenge us by dropping a solid, rubber brick into the pool and asking us to swim down and get it. My sisters and I were always the first people to volunteer. I don’t know what the most ‘advanced’ swimming badge I got was but I know that one of them was 500m of non-stop swimming, going up and down the length of that pool. I’m a good swimmer, and the water does not scare me. Even now, I find more comfort being beneath the water than being above it.

Even now, I am drawn to that endless, unseen expanse of blue.

When I was ten, my father enrolled myself and my older sister in a scuba-diving course. I can’t remember why he did it, or how long we spent learning the ins and outs of diving, but we were soon both qualified scuba-divers. We ended up fully qualifying in Malta, actually, doing the final open-water parts of our qualification while on holiday there as a family. We did a few more dives while we were there, me and my sister and my dad, and they were… nice. They were fine. 

But they’re not why I’m here. They’re not why I’m giving this statement. I’m not here to tell you about those dives.

I’m here to tell you about the other one.

After my older sister and I qualified, one of my younger sisters joined us a year or so later, qualifying almost as soon as she was old enough to. Shortly after, my father took her and myself on a scuba diving trip to Sharm El Sheikh, in Egypt. My older sister, for reasons of her own, declined to join us. All things considered, that was probably for the best. Getting home from that trip was an experience to say the least, but not because of what happened while we were there. Not because of what happened to me. Even now, my family doesn't know about what happened to me while underwater. They don’t need to know.

We went on multiple dives during the week or so that we were there, but of all of them, there is only one that still sticks with me, clinging on to my terrible, faltering memory. I can’t recall exactly when the dive was, or how far through the holiday we were when we did it, but I know it was the second of three that we were going on that day, each one broken up by a short boat trip to the next site that was just enough to dry your wetsuit out to the point of it being uncomfortable. The dives that day were all taking place along the edge of a coral reef, dropping us into the water at various points along the length of it. I can’t remember what the two other dive sites looked like. I can’t remember what fish we saw. What I do remember, though, was the shape of the dive site. As I said, we were diving along a coral reef – it clung to the edge of a rocky shelf that stretched out from a beach before dropping down some 15 meters or so. From there, it broadened into a plateau, teeming with fish and coral and all manner of ocean life. We saw a moray eel down there, wrapped fast asleep around a pillar of stone and looking for all the world like it was snoring. It was a beautiful place, with the sheer wall rising up beside you and the ground beneath you vibrant with coral and life. Until, that is, you swum over to where the plateau ended. Because where the plateau ended, there was nothing at all. There was nothing but a sheer drop straight down, the ground falling away further than you could ever hope to see. On the boat, we’d been told that the drop was some 275 metres. Looking at it in person, I could not hope to tell you how accurate a measurement that was. All I know is that that open expanse of deep, endless, perfect blue simultaneously thrilled me and terrified me.

As it was, though, our dive did not take us out over it. After all, there was nothing to see out there beyond endless water, and so we, along with the handful of other divers we encountered, stuck to the route along the plateau that our dive instructor led us on. There was plenty to see, the reef filled with more fish than I knew the signs for, but after about forty minutes of diving we had to take a little break. My sister was having trouble with her BCD – her buoyancy control device – and so my Dad was hanging back to help her out. It’s generally bad practice to split a dive group and so myself and the instructor waited around with them. For my part, I mostly just looked around at all the fish, trying to recognise ones that I’d seen on previous dives. 

While we were waiting, though, our instructor noticed a manta ray swimming nearby. We’d never seen one on any previous dives and so this was quite exciting, but it was already starting to move away from us. Now, my dad’s been diving for a while longer than both me or my sister, and so I suspect that’s why our dive instructor only quickly checked that my dad was alright helping my sister before asking me if I wanted to swim after the manta. I, of course, said yes, and so after quickly double-checking with my dad, we left him and my sister and swam off after the ray. It wasn’t moving very fast and we were able to catch up to it quite quickly, and very soon I found myself swimming _above_ a manta ray, watching how it moved through the water as it led us on a meandering path along the plateau. At some point, I don’t know when, it turned off the main plateau and swam out into the open ocean, but we kept following it. It was at around this point that our dive instructor decided to go back to check on my dad and sister, so he indicated to me that he was doing that and headed off, leaving me with the manta. I followed it for a bit longer, simply marvelling at being so close to such a creature, and then, after a few minutes, I decided to stop bothering it and let it go about its day. I stopped swimming with it, watching as it turned back in the direction of the plateau. For a few seconds I watched it, following its course through the water, and then I turned back to see where I had ended up.

And the only thing that I saw was blue.

15 meters underwater, it’s hard to see the waves above your head without actively looking up. From where I was, with nothing to block my view, I should have been able to see the surface eventually, but I didn’t. I didn’t see anything. There were no features to catch my eye, no rocks or coral or fish to break up the hollow, yawning expanse of blue. There was just… ocean. There was nothing _but_ ocean. When I looked down, all I could see was my flippers moving slowly and carefully above an endless, terrifying void. The water beneath me was so, so dark, featureless and horrifying and wonderful all at once. There was nothing there. There was _nothing there._ I couldn’t see anything but water, but I didn’t look up. I couldn’t look up. I could only stare, fascinated, at the nothingness that waited beneath me.

I very distinctly remember thinking that if I were to remove my weight belt right then, and drop it into the ocean below me, that no living human would ever see those pieces of lead again.

I don’t know how long I floated there, suspended in the water. It didn’t feel like very long, but at the same time it felt like hours. I didn’t think. I didn’t have anything _to_ think. All I could see was the endless blue stretching out before me, drawing me into it. I couldn’t see the surface. I couldn’t see where the ocean floor lay. I couldn’t see any indication of land, or of life. There was nothing there. I couldn’t even see the manta ray anymore. As far as I was aware, in that moment, nothing else existed but me and the waiting expanse before me.

And everything was so, so quiet.

Sound travels better underwater. That’s a known fact. But it can’t travel underwater when there’s nothing to create it, and there was nothing then. There was nothing at all. When you dive, you get accustomed pretty quickly to how loud your own breathing is, but in those long, hanging minutes underwater, my breath seemed almost deafening. 

Now, here’s a fun fact about me that most people never need to know: I don’t breathe enough. It’s not just a side effect of chest binding, either – my entire life I’ve had a slightly odd breathing pattern, where I hold my breath between every inhale and exhale and every exhale and inhale. It’s not enough to cause problems, and it’s not something that I normally notice, either.

I noticed it then.

When the only thing you can hear is your own breathing, you notice pretty damn fast when it’s not happening. In the absence of any of the background, ambient noise we’re normally so accustomed to, the harsh sound of my breath came clearer than ever, making each and every pause seem even more silent in comparison. I didn’t want to disturb the silence. I didn’t want to break it with my breathing. But I had to keep breathing. I knew that.

I couldn’t tell you how long I spent in that open blue, listening to myself breathe as the water pushed down on me. I don’t know if I moved. If I did, it wasn’t intentionally. I didn’t feel any drive to do anything but just wait, alone in the endless ocean. It was peaceful, so far beneath the surface. It was quiet. Beneath my skin I could feel myself growing more and more afraid, fear lancing along my nerves like thorns as I realised that there could be anything beneath me, but the fear felt distant. It didn’t matter. 

All that mattered was the ocean embracing me.

After some time, something at the back of my mind reminded me that I had come underwater with other people. I had entered the water with three other people, I remembered; my dad, and my sister, and the dive instructor. And they weren’t with me. They were somewhere else.

They would be waiting for me.

It was harder than I thought it would be to turn away from the open blue. I had to force myself to move, reminding myself over and over again that my sister was waiting for me, that my dad was waiting for me, that we had another dive to go on after this one. I forced myself away from the ocean and I swam all the way back to the plateau. It seemed so far away, like there was an entire other ocean between me and it, but I kept on swimming. I had to join my dad and my sister. I could feel the ocean at my back, wrapping around me on all sides like it intended to keep me there. I could feel my weight belt, balancing out my body’s natural buoyancy to pull me down. There was so much endless water behind me, beneath me, above me. I could stay.

But I didn’t.

I kept swimming. I left the ocean behind me and rejoined my family, and when I crossed back from open water to solid stone I felt the strangest combination of relief and loss.

We finished the dive. I don’t remember the rest of it. My sister’s BCD was functioning normally by the time I returned, and a week or so later I was back home in England, far away from that hollow, waiting void beneath the waves. We haven’t been on any other diving holidays since. If I were to go diving again, I would need to take a refresher course to make sure that I would be safe under the water. But that’s alright. 

I don’t think I’m ready to go back into the ocean quite yet.

**Author's Note:**

> So when in the summary I said that this statement is a true story, I meant it. This is something that genuinely happened to me when I was... about 13 or so? 14? Anyway, I've never written a Magnus statement before, so I hope you guys enjoyed it!
> 
> Thanks to [Jack](https://archiveofourown.org/users/DoilySpider/works) and [E](https://archiveofourown.org/users/thebookishdark) for beta reading!

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] #0201803 - Expanse](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23337589) by [CorvidCastle](https://archiveofourown.org/users/CorvidCastle/pseuds/CorvidCastle)




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